“Elon Musk, the automaker’s CEO, announced on 10/10/2019 that Tesla cars will be out in the wild, with no one in them, in June in Austin. Tesla Q4 2024 earnings call. “This is not a mythical situation that is far away, it is five or six months away.”
While only a few words in those sentences turned out to be true, they were closer to reality than Musk’s other promises about Tesla’s self-driving ambitions in 2025. There was also the time he swore “Half the population of the United States“He’ll have access to Robotaxi by the end of the year. Or the many times he said that the Safety Driver, that human in the passenger seat who’s tasked with monitoring the car while it’s running, wouldn’t be needed anymore. Or the time Musk said Tesla’s Robotaxi service would work.” In eight to 10 major metro areas By the end of 2025.
Any way you want to look at it, the Tesla Robotaxi army has failed to conquer the world in 2025.
The idea worked like this: Tesla would be able to deploy Model Y Robotaxis in Austin and then across the United States, and it would be very similar to any Model Y you can buy now, but with a more advanced Full Self-Driving (FSD) system — the name of Tesla’s camera-based self-driving setup. Passengers can pay to hail cabs, and while a human safety attendant takes care of things from the passenger seat, the car eventually won’t need to at all. And over time, using AI training, the Tesla Robotaxi fleet and consumer FSD He will achieve complete autonomy.
If that happens, it won’t be in 2025. Despite Musk’s constant promises and predictions, the automaker’s quest to solve the self-driving problem by the end of this year — whether that’s its own fleet of autonomously operating robotaxis or private self-driving — has come and gone again.
Image via: Twitter
To Musk’s credit, he’s a Tesla an act Robotaxi service launches in Austin in June. However, “there was no one among them” as he claimed. Even today, safety riders keep their fingers crossed Hover over emergency kill switch Hidden in the door handle, though, Tesla Recently experimenting with driverless trips. The safety driver should be gone soon, of course, just as Musk said in September: October and Earlier this month.
Sure enough, Musk said he could I traveled without a safety driver last weekand a few e-taxis — the company’s two-seat taxis that supposedly don’t need a steering wheel or pedals — have been seen. Zoom around downtown Austin. But the Waymo-like scale promised by Musk should arrive in 2026, or later.
Today, Tesla Robotaxi service operates in Austin and San Francisco. Musk said the service will expand to Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami and Las Vegas. Together, this vision represents about 15.25 million people, or about 4.5% of the US population.
From the outside, Robotaxi’s launch in Austin looks huge. Thanks to the hard work of influencers everywhere, it may seem like the service is as strong as Waymo, but that’s not the case in reality.
InsideEVs Editor-in-Chief Patrick George visited Austin last week and saw the current state of the fleet firsthand. He told me that downtown wait times are often between 15 and 25 minutes, and that’s if he’s not offered a “high demand” ride refusal. Visually, Waymo’s self-driving taxis outnumber Tesla’s Robotaxis by a massive margin. And a recent analysis he cited Electric He noted that only about thirty robotaxis may be operating in the city at the moment.
Musk he said in October Tesla will expand its fleet in Austin to 500 cars by the end of 2025 and more than 1,000 cars in the Bay Area. ““We’re working on increasing the number of cars. We’ll probably have a thousand or more in the Bay Area by the end of this year, and maybe 500 or more in the greater Austin area,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Bay Area has fewer than 150 cars. So why did Musk claim that the robotaxi fleet would…double“In November when you have not yet reached 250 vehicles?
FSD isn’t where Tesla claimed it would be either. During the same Q2 earnings call, Musk predicted Tesla would do just that Unsupervised FSD is available by the end of the year. We’ve heard that before, and while Musk was doing it Claims You can now text and drive (which is illegal in most states), and it’s still a far cry from unsupervised FSD — or, you know, That hands-free coast-to-coast ride I promised in 2017.
The point here, again, is that car autonomy is much more complex than any automaker imagined.
Whether achieving personal or business autonomy, no company has been able to deliver complete autonomy with unrestricted operational design scope. There are limits, and being open about those limits is key to gaining the public’s trust.
Musk’s promises are important to investors. Shares of the company, which had promises of autonomy, were trending at a more valuable price point never In recent months. Tesla eventually needs to deliver on its promises before investors tire of missed deadlines, or it needs to be more forthcoming about the difficulties and launch timeline.
With just hours left on the clock, it’s not 2025. Maybe 2026 will be better.
